Information technology has become the “silent partner” for clinicians as they practice medicine. A number of clinical applications are available that aid clinicians in many facets of their practice, including business management and patient care. One example of such a clinical application is the Cerner Millennium® application available from Cerner Corporation of North Kansas City, Mo. These clinical applications often allow clinicians to effectively manage vast amounts of healthcare related information. However, if clinicians have difficulties with these clinical applications, the information may not be readily available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, potentially causing the healthcare process to become dangerously slow and more prone to errors. As a result, clinicians actively engaged in critical healthcare functions need a support system that is ready at an instant, so that the medical process can continue unabated.
Clinicians often require immediate answers to their questions in order to provide high quality patient care. Clinicians are highly mobile and typically are not in one place long enough to receive a response to their request for assistance if the response is not immediate. Currently, when clinicians need assistance with clinical applications, the clinicians may contact a help desk to request support. For example, a clinician who has difficulty accessing a portion of a patient's record within a particular clinical application may send an email to the help desk detailing the problem. The help desk may receive the email and then either attempt to call the clinician or reply to the email. However, there is often a lag between the clinician's email and the help desk's response. The clinician may no longer be available if the help desk attempts to call the clinician, or the clinician may no longer have access to the clinical application if the clinician is at a new location. An email response would allow the clinician to review the response at a convenient time, but if the information is needed immediately, such a response may be untimely and therefore ineffective. Moreover, if the initial email response is inadequate to address the issue faced by a clinician, resolution of that issue may require a time-consuming back and forth process between the clinician and the help desk.
Alternatively, the clinician may place a phone call request for assistance to the help desk. However, the help desk may not be readily available to adequately assist the clinician. For example, the particular issue faced by the clinician may require a person at the help desk who has the technical capacity to address the issue. This may involve an escalation in which the clinician is forwarded to various representatives at the help desk until a representative who is capable of assisting the clinician is reached. This may be a timely process that is unacceptable to the clinician.
A further drawback to current approaches to assist clinicians with clinical applications is that help desk representatives often do not have specific information that would aid the process, such as characteristics of the clinical application, characteristics of the computing environment, and information regarding the clinician requesting support, for example. Typically, a clinician can attempt to provide such information and explain the issue for which the clinician is seeking assistance. However, if the clinician does not know particular information and/or has difficulty explaining the issue, the support process will be hindered.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide effective technical support to clinicians using clinical applications. In addition, the ability to automatically provide support representatives with information to aid the process, such as information regarding the clinical applications, would be advantageous. It would also be helpful to automatically route clinicians to the appropriate support representative. Further, because healthcare information is typically sensitive material, it would be beneficial if HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act) compliance and security was maintained during such support sessions.